MA, 1 year full time/2 years part time
Subject overview
Sussex is ranked among the top 20 universities in the UK for English in The Times Good University Guide 2013 and among the top 30 in the UK in The Complete University Guide 2014.
In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 95 per cent of our English research was rated as recognised internationally or higher, and over half rated as internationally excellent or higher.
English at Sussex has a well-established international reputation for producing research that develops and extends the boundaries of the subject.
English runs a wide range of innovative MA degrees, taught by faculty working at the forefront of English studies.
We support research centres such as the Centre for Modernist Studies and the Centre for Early Modern Studies, which focus on interdisciplinary research and teaching, and attract high-profile speakers from around the world.
We have a diverse and thriving community of postgraduate students who contribute to an outstanding research culture.
Programme outline
Embracing the imaginative and historical, the literary and linguistic, English as a subject continuously re-invents its interpretive grasp of the world. This MA enables you to engage with critical directions that currently shape the discipline.
This course explores literature from Shakespeare to the contemporary. The University of Sussex offers you an ideal environment for further study. We are acclaimed for our critical innovation and are rich in research collections – for example the Woolf papers, the Kipling papers and the Mass Observation Archive – and we are positioned in an area of fascinating literary history.
This MA will be particularly attractive to those who seek a historically and conceptually diverse postgraduate degree in English. It presents you with opportunities to engage with new work and to deepen your existing understanding of both literature and language. It combines teaching in seminars, lectures, and workshops with individual supervision, helping you develop your reading and writing talents to the highest academic levels.
We continue to develop and update our modules for 2013 entry to ensure you have the best student experience. In addition to the course structure below, you may find it helpful to refer to the 2012 modules tab.
Autumn and spring terms: you take the core module The Idea of the Self and either Contemporary Writing: Novels and Histories or Modernism 1900-1945. You also take two options from modules such as Dickens: Special Author, or you can choose options from the array offered by the School’s other MA degrees that examine literature from the Renaissance to the contemporary, or English as a global language, often from interdisciplinary perspectives.
Summer term: you prepare a dissertation on a topic of your choosing in consultation with a supervisor.
Full-time courses can also be followed part time over two years, with taught seminars in the autumn and spring terms.
Assessment
Assessment modes are specifically designed to help you develop a confident critical voice within your own research project (3,500 words). Bibliographic exercises, portfolio work-in-progress and short essays broaden towards more independent pieces of work, culminating in a supervised dissertation (11,500 words) in which you will present a distinctive critical argument that reflects your specific interests.
Current modules
Please note that these are the core modules and options (subject to availability) for students starting in the academic year 2012.
Dickens and Victorian England
30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1
Dickens was the most successful and popular writer of his generation and during this course you will study a selection of his novels, journalism and short fiction in its contemporary cultural, social and political contexts. Drawing on and extending older traditions, Dickens's writing played a central role in the development of the novel during the mid-19th century, often in controversial ways. His fiction actively intervened in a wide range of contemporary issues and debates between the 1830s and 1870. These include an investigation of modern society, above all in the city; poverty, wealth and money; and the relationship between social classes and between the underworld and the powerful. Dickens also explores the family as both a social unity and a shaper of the self; the nature and meaning of modern childhood and forms of femininity and masculinity; and the slippery relationship between the 'normal' and the 'abnormal'.
Dickens was familiar with many contemporary debates on the nature of the self, and his work explores a range of aspects of the nature of the conscious and unconscious mind: dreams, states of trance, double self and the working of memory, and these will be an important aspect of the course. You will also explore Dickens's use and transformation of various genres and conventions - fairy tales, ghost stories, gothic fiction, melodrama, and reportage - and discuss how his shifting narrative shapes the social and psychological themes of his work.
English Studies Autumn term options
30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1
English Studies Spring term options
30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1
Modernism 1910-1945
30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1
You will explore the achievements and limits of English modernism through a detailed examination of the work of two of its principal writers, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.
Eliot's contributions as a poet, essayist and dramatist were key to the revolution in the theory and practice of modern poetry, while Woolf's contributions as a novelist and essayist were key to the revolution and practice of the modern novel. You will explore the similarities and differences in their treatment of mind and consciousness; their views of and treatment of history; their representation of the city; their attitudes to questions of sexuality and gender; their notions of nation and of national identity; their responses to new mass cultural technologies from the popular press to photography, radio and the cinema; and their responses to the key events of the period in which they lived, including the First and the Second World Wars, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism.
The module will be organised chronologically and thematically and will enable you to follow personal as well as intellectual associations between Eliot and Woolf and between Eliot, Woolf and their modernist contemporaries. You will, in particular, reflect on the ways in which Woolf responded as a writer to Eliot's work and Eliot as a writer responded to Woolf's work.
The Idea of the Self
30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1
You will explore concepts of 'the self' and constructions of subjectivity in a range of historical periods and genres. Beginning with the autobiographical impulse embodied in the essays of Michel de Montaigne, you will explore representations of the subject and self-consciousness as manifest in a number of historical moments and literary forms from the 16th to the 21st century. Major topics include: concepts of interiority, forms of autobiographical writing, the self and others, the diasporic self and multiple selves.
You will focus on major texts of English literature at particular cultural moments from the 16th century to the present day, and will enable you both to understand the historical construction and development of concepts of the self and also closely examine literary performances of the self in a wide variety of forms from autobiography to fiction, drama and poetry. Topics will explore a range of theoretical arguments about the relationship of concepts of subjectivity to their historical, political and cultural contexts. Throughout, you will study literary texts in the context of other contemporary historical documents. For example, 19th century fictional texts exploring concepts of the double such as R.L. Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde will be read alongside contemporary psychological theories of multiple personality; contemporary fiction by migrant writers such as Zadie Smith's White Teeth will be situated alongside non-fictional texts. Overall you will question the emergence, establishment and perpetuation of different ideas of selfhood in particular literary, historical and political contexts.
The Novel and History: Questions and representations since 1945
30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1
You will explore recent and contemporary novels written in English that represent and interpret historical experience. You will consider both substantive and formal aspects of the selected works, addressing the theme of how the novel as a form can represent, mediate and interpret historical experience in a variety of contexts, illustrating some of the diverse traditions, projects and audiences with which English-language fiction is engaged today.
You will also consider larger questions of fictional form and genre, especially as these relate to the ways in which novels may be read as quasi-historical narratives
Writers that you will study will vary, but could include Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, John McGahern, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jean Rhys and Salman Rushdie.
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Entry requirements
UK entrance requirements
A first or upper second-class undergraduate honours degree in a relevant subject.
Overseas entrance requirements
Please refer to column A on the Overseas qualifications.
If you have any questions about your qualifications after consulting our overseas
qualifications table, contact the University.
E pg.enquiries@sussex.ac.uk
Visas and immigration
Find out more about Visas and immigration.
English language requirements
IELTS 7.0, with not less than 6.5 in each section. Internet TOEFL with 95 overall, with at least 22 in Listening, 23 in Reading, 23 in Speaking and 24 in Writing.
For more information, refer to English language requirements.
For more information about the admissions process at Sussex
For pre-application enquiries:
Student Recruitment Services
T +44 (0)1273 876787
E pg.enquiries@sussex.ac.uk
For post-application enquiries:
Postgraduate Admissions,
University of Sussex,
Sussex House, Falmer,
Brighton BN1 9RH, UK
T +44 (0)1273 877773
F +44 (0)1273 678545
E pg.applicants@sussex.ac.uk
Related programmes
Fees and funding
Fees
Home UK/EU students: £7,3001
Channel Island and Isle of Man students: £7,3002
Overseas students: £14,1003
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The fee shown is for the academic year 2013.
2
The fee shown is for the academic year 2013.
3
The fee shown is for the academic year 2013.
To find out about your fee status, living expenses and other costs, visit further financial information.
Funding
The funding sources listed below are for the subject area you are viewing and may not apply to all degrees listed within it. Please check the description of the individual funding source to make sure it is relevant to your chosen degree.
To find out more about funding and part-time work, visit further financial information.
Leverhulme Trade Charities Trust for Postgraduate Study (2013)
Region: UK
Level: PG (taught), PG (research)
Application deadline: 1 October 2013
The Leverhulme Trade Charities Trust are offering bursaries to Postgraduate students following any postgraduate degree courses in any subject.
Sussex Graduate Scholarship (2013)
Region: UK, Europe (Non UK), International (Non UK/EU)
Level: PG (taught)
Application deadline: 16 August 2013
Open to final year Sussex students who graduate with a 1st or 2:1 degree and who are offered a F/T place on an eligible Masters course in 2013.
Faculty interests
Faculty research interests are described briefly below. For more detailed information, visit School of English: People and contacts.
The following list includes all the English faculty, and other contributors to English MA degrees.
The journals Renaissance Studies, Textual Practice, The Oxford Literary Review and The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory are edited within the School of English.
Dr Gavin Ashenden 20th-century myth and metaphysics; psychology, psychoanalysis and belief.
Dr Sara Jane Bailes Contemporary experimental theatre, live art and visual practices, ideology and performance.
Dr David Barnett Post-war European drama and theatre, post-Brechtian political theatre.
Professor Peter Boxall Modern and contemporary fiction and drama.
Dr Sara Crangle Co-Director of the Centre for Modernist Studies. 20th-century literature.
Professor Brian Cummings 16th- and 17th-century literature and history.
Dr Sue Currell American literature and culture 1890-1940, 20th-century mass culture.
Dr Alistair Davies Modernism and postmodernism, 20th-century English and American literature.
Dr Denise DeCaires Narain Postcolonialist writing; feminist cultural theory; contemporary women’s writing in English, especially poetry.
Dr Matthew Dimmock 16th- and 17th-century literature and history, national identity, Islam.
Professor Andrew Hadfield Renaissance literature and politics, Britishness, Shakespeare, Spenser, and national identity.
Dr Doug Haynes European and American modernism, postmodernism.
Dr Margaret Healy Renaissance literature and culture, the political stage, Shakespeare, Dekker, medicine and literature.
Professor Tom Healy Head of School. 16th- and 17th-century writing and cultural history.
Dr Vicky Lebeau The convergence of psychoanalysis, literature and cinema; and feminist theory.
Dr William McEvoy British playwriting and directing; theatre, writing and ethics.
Dr Daniel Kane 20th-century American literature, the avant-garde, poetry since the 1960s.
Dr Maria Lauret American feminist fiction and theory; race and ethnicity.
Professor Stephanie Newell West African literature and popular culture, postcolonial theory.
Dr Rachel O’Connell Late 19th- and early 20th-century British literature; gender, queer, and disability studies.
Dr Catherine Packham 18th-century literature and philosophy; political economy and moral philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment.
Dr Jason Price Popular theatre histories and practices; politics and performance.
Dr Vincent Quinn Lesbian and gay studies, the history of sexuality, 18th-century studies, Irish studies, and the history and theory of biography.
Dr John David Rhodes Italian cinema, modernist and avant-garde cinemas of Europe and the US, queer art cinema.
Professor Nicholas Royle Modern literature and literary theory, especially deconstruction and psychoanalysis; the uncanny.
Martin Ryle 19th- and 20th-century fiction; the politics of ‘culture’, with especial reference to education; and topographical and travel writing.
Dr Minoli Salgado Postcolonial literature and theory, memory and migrant identity, the short story, Rushdie, and Ondaatje.
Professor Lindsay Smith 19th-century literature and painting; photography in Victorian culture.
Dr Keston Sutherland Contemporary and 20th-century English and American poetry; Marxism and Frankfurt School critical theory.
Professor Jenny Bourne Taylor 19th-century literature and culture; literature and science; illegitimacy and the family.
Dr Pamela Thurschwell Co-Director of the Centre for Modernist Studies. Psychoanalysis, 19th- and 20th-century interest in the supernatural.
Professor Norman Vance 19th-century literature, religion and society; Anglo-Irish literature.
Professor Marcus Wood Satire in the romantic period, the representation of slavery, and colonial and postcolonial literature and theory.
Careers and profiles
Our graduates have gone on to careers in teaching and education, publishing, website production and marketing, journalism and writing, the charity sector, and NGOs. A number of our graduates go on to further study and careers in academia.
Alistair's faculty perspective
‘Our MA in English Studies is Sussex at its best: innovative, ambitious and demanding. With its inventive modes of teaching and learning, we believe that this programme is at the forefront of postgraduate studies in this country. Graduates of English literature and of other disciplines in the humanities, including those who wish to return to study after a period away, will find this intensive programme hugely appealing. We aim to equip students with the skills needed for doctoral study, for professional development as teachers of English literature and for entry into a host of professions where lucid writing and original thinking are valued.'
Dr Alistair Davies
Senior Lecturer in English
University of Sussex
For more information, visit Careers and alumni.
School and contacts
School of English
Over the last 30 years, English at Sussex has played a key role in shaping the direction of the discipline in Britain and throughout the world. The School of English offers you exciting potential for engaging with English as a world language and literature.
School of English, PG Admissions,
University of Sussex, Falmer,
Brighton BN1 9QN, UK
T +44 (0)1273 678468
E englishpg@sussex.ac.uk
School of English
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